Following money between exchanges, funds and individuals used to require an enterprise licence. Arkham made it a free web app, and for tracing a hack, a treasury or a whale's activity it is fast and effective.
What it does well
Entity clustering that groups addresses under a single owner, visual flow tracing, alerts on specific entities, and coverage across major chains including exchange deposit attribution. The interface is genuinely well built — faster to answer a question than Etherscan and far more legible than raw explorer data.
The attribution problem
Labels are probabilistic. Arkham has publicly attributed wallets to named individuals and organisations, sometimes wrongly, and there is no meaningful process for a subject to contest an incorrect label. If you act on an attribution — trading, reporting or accusing — treat it as a hypothesis to verify on-chain rather than as fact.
The incentive question
Arkham operates an intel exchange where users can post bounties for the identification of specific wallets, and be paid for supplying it. That is a marketplace in deanonymisation, applied to a technology whose privacy properties are already weak. It is legal and it is worth being clear-eyed about: using the tool participates in an ecosystem that treats individual privacy as a tradeable commodity.
Who should use Arkham
Researchers, journalists and traders tracing flows, using the free tier for most work. Cross-check attributions before relying on them.